[Step 3] – Launch – 6 Steps to Social Media Success

After you have found your audience and have relevant social profiles in place with appropriate branding, launching your campaign is the next big step. The idea of a launch is to grab the attention of your target audience and encourage them to interact with your business, letting them know who you are and what you do and how you can help them solve their problems. There are many ways to do with, some of which I will explain below.

If you’ve missed my previous articles in this series, you can find the links below:

Before you even start posting updates and creating content, keeping a consistent image across all profiles and network is extremely crucial to your branding. Make sure you use all the same photos, logos, images, profile bio, website link, company story, colours and fonts on all your profiles where possible.

Create a Lead Magnet

To attract people to your website, social media, or other destination you will need some quality, relevant content or an offer. Preferably both. Your content could be in the form of a blog post, ebook, report, video or photo that is created with your audience interests in mind showing how your business solves their problem, but don’t forget to give away loads of value so you make a good first impression. Your audience can then share this content with their friends and start the process of word of mouth marketing. So if you are a restaurant, don’t write a blog post on New Planet Discoveries, keep it relevant to your business, pretty simple stuff, right?! Your offer could include a discount or cash incentive, free e-book or training series all in exchange for an e-mail address, Like or Retweet.

Run a Competition

This is one of the best ways to launch your social media campaign. Offering a considerable prize that would be of value to your audience will attract a TON of activity. After all, who can resist something for nothing! My advice would be to go through a Facebook app (Wildfire or Voitago) as any other method on Facebook is against your user agreement. These services do cost, but can produce a beautiful campaign that enhances the viral nature of Facebook to expand the reach of your competition. By integrating Facebook Ads to drive traffic, your competition could even go viral!

Talk to people

To get the word out about your content, offer or competition you need to do some talking! So get on Twitter, start following others and introduce yourself. Let other bloggers know about you and ask if they would be willing to help promote your content to their followers, just make sure your content is relevant to their audience. Leave genuine, insightful comments on conversations in Facebook groups and on Fan Pages that offers value to the reader.

These techniques should start to help your social media profiles gain traction and traffic. The aim of this launch is to make people aware of who you are and how you can help them. You will start to build relationships with other key players in your industry and leverage their audiences to help you spread your message even further!